Be the change you want to see

Factual Questions
1

If you type the quote “Be the change you want to see” into Google you get 590,000 hits - and almost all of the top hits reference cite Gandhi as the source. However, I have spent hours looking on various sites to find where in Gandhi’s writings or speeches this quote occurs - and been unsuccessful. None of the good online sources of quotations that include citations have this quote. Google Book Search cannot find this quote if I restrict to books with “Gandhi” as the author.

Did Gandhi say this? If so where, and what is the complete context?

Why it matters: this quote is used to support the idea that you can’t make change in the world unless your behavior (or the behavior of your group) models the ideals in your vision of a better world. For example, in a social justice organization I am involved with, this quote is used to argue that we should be run non-hierarchically, even though years of bad management and lack of hierarchy have meant that the organization has been marvelously ineffective for a decade or more.

If Gandhi did not say this, I’d like to be able to definitively say so. If he did, I’d like to see the context so that I could better understand what he was trying to say.

2

As someone who has edited a book of quotations, I can say from experience that there’s no evidence for many of the quotes commonly attirbuted to famous people. That is to say, you can find many sources that repeat the quotation (“Abraham Lincoln said…”) but no evidence that the subject himself ever actiually said or wrote those words. It doesn’t appear in the person’s writings, letters, or even in contemporary accounts. Actually tracking down the source of this quotes and confirming their veracity is very difficult.

Having said that, there is a quasi-official collection of Gandhi’s writings, which is available on the web. It’s called the CWMG (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi), and includes books articles and speeches. I did a search at one online version and couldn’t find your quote anywhere. I’m not on expert on Gandhi so I wouldn’t say my quick search was definitive, but let’s just say I’m dubious.

3

I vaguely remember as a kid being told it was Martin Luther King . . .